(Daily Signal)—As a Republican holdout on the “big, beautiful” budget bill, as President Donald Trump calls it, Sen. Ron Johnson thinks he has a fairly simple request for the 10-year budget plan: Go back to the drawing board and cut spending down to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels.
“That pretty well sums it up in one chart,” said Johnson, R-Wis., in his office Tuesday, passing a historical timeline of deficit levels across his desk.
Johnson, a fiscal hawk who was first elected senator during the fiscally conservative tea party wave of 2010, would like to see Republicans hit the brakes on the current bill and slash federal programs.
The chart goes from the $200 billion deficit levels of the early 2000s to the $2.6 trillion deficits projected by the Congressional Budget Office for the mid-2030s if the House of Representatives’ big, beautiful bill were to pass as is.
Johnson says these budgetary deficits could have catastrophic effects, as signaled by shaky bond markets he thinks are reacting to runaway spending and excessive borrowing.
“The bond markets are indicating things: Moody’s, the last credit rating agency to downgrade our credit rating. These are all signs,” he said.
“They’re not good signs. Global investors—one of the reasons interest rates are moving up is they’re not plowing their money into the U.S. bond as a safe haven. They’re buying gold. Just look at what the market is telling us. The market doesn’t lie.”
What Will Trump Say?
Johnson’s current opposition to the bill may put him in an awkward position with Trump—who has called for its speedy passage—but he says he’s hopeful Trump can be won over. Johnson is a longtime ally of the president.
He was reportedly phoned into a conversation between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., on Monday.
“I’m more than willing to work with the president. Based on our conversation, it sounds like he’s more than willing to work with me and others that have serious reservations. He wants to bend that [deficit] down,” the Wisconsin lawmaker said, adding:
At the State of the Union, [Trump] said he wanted to balance the budget. Well, we’re a long way from balancing the budget.
Johnson’s Counterproposal
Johnson’s proposal is to split the bill in two. One bill would “get what we need to get done quickly”; namely, raising the debt ceiling for a year to avoid a default on the national debt, extending Trump’s first-term 2017 tax cuts before their expiration, and banking the easiest savings.
The second part, Johnson said, would be a Department of Government Efficiency-inspired “forensic analysis” of the federal budget, in which “you can probably eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of spending that nobody would even notice, other than the grifters who are sucking down the waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“Did you realize there’s 2,600 programs in the federal government?” he said. “I bet you could eliminate half of them, and you would be none the wiser.”
He dismissed the idea that these cuts would clash with the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which forbids provisions that are not primarily budgetary.
“The things I’m talking about all have budgetary impacts. I mean, you just cut a program up,” he said.
Johnson told The Daily Signal that he’s not alone in his wish to dramatically alter the 10-year spending plan.
There are “four people that unless significant changes are made, we’ll not support it,” he said, adding:
I think there’s a much larger number of people who get this, want to do something about it, are probably a whole lot quieter than those of us who are speaking out about this.
As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, Johnson is in a position to potentially stall the bill if he so wishes.
“My primary effort right now is just to force people to look at the numbers, to make them look at the facts and acknowledge them,” he said, when asked whether he would attempt to use that position as leverage.
Will Johnson Fold Under Pressure?
The situation is sure to get more stressful for Johnson the closer the Senate gets to its preferred deadline for passage of the bill of Independence Day, July 4.
Asked what he would do if Republican leadership dared him to vote against a bill that would extend Trump’s tax cuts and prevent a potential default on the national debt, Johnson suggested he wouldn’t blink.
“I recommend they don’t dare me,” he replied. “Work with me, and let’s do something that can pass, something that I can support.”
A likely reason the entire budget process has been packed into one big, beautiful bill as opposed to two or three is to increase the pressure on members to vote for it.
If controversial provisions are included with others that are almost universally considered necessary by Republicans—such as raising the debt ceiling—then holdouts are less likely to vote against the bill.
Johnson says that won’t work on him.
“That has succeeded in the past. It still might succeed; it’s hard to say. I mean, I know why they bundled it all up,” he said.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re going to really vote against it? You’re going to vote to, in effect, default on the debt? You’re going to vote to actually increase people’s taxes?’”
“I understand the pressure coming our way, but this is what I can’t vote for. I can’t accept this without doing something about it,” he said, pointing at the deficit chart again.
“We can’t acquiesce to this. I mean, what we’re doing here, it’s wrong. It’s immoral. The transfer of wealth from young to old is literally immoral. It’s got to stop.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.